Beautiful Faces: The Living Portrait

It can be posited that every woman and man who wears makeup is a walking, talking piece of art. Cosmetics and beauty products are, in part, body paint, with which to adorn the face and other areas. Beautiful faces: The living portrait is a brief exploration of this kind of intimate art. Why do we paint our faces and highlight some features over others? What does the wearer hope to achieve by this artifice? Little girls learn to apply makeup at their mother’s side. It is very much a handed down kind of thing. The fact that the beauty industry is a multi-billion-dollar business is testament to its popularity among many women globally.

Face Painting is Art

Face painting and shading is, often, the only kind of craft that many women pursue in their lives. Arts and crafts, generally, fall away for most folks after their schooling is finished with. “I can’t draw” and “I can’t paint” are frequent rejoinders from people as they make their way through adulthood. This is not exactly true in the case of those women who regularly apply makeup to their own faces. The face as a blank canvas, then, eye shadow is, perhaps, applied, followed by some blush or highlighter to the cheekbones. Lipstick is the piece de resistance, the colouring of these sensitive fleshy verges, sends a powerful message to the opposite sex.

Beauty is All About Procreation

Sex is at the heart of the matter, where cosmetics come into things. Beauty is all about procreation, when one boils things down to their core elements. Nature bestows beauty upon the fairer sex to encourage rumpy pumpy and, therefore, the promulgation of the species. Check out this fine example of an online retailer of quality cruelty free beauty products. Nature may be brutal at times, but only mankind had been consistently cruel over millennia. Beasts have been beaten, eaten and enslaved for centuries. We have made cruelty into an art form.

Human Beauty Skin Deep

Thankfully, there are positive signs emerging from within the cosmetics industry that this reliance on animal testing is gradually waning. Face painting is one thing but torturing animals on the basis of vanity is a pretty repugnant reality. Human beings are slowly evolving from their wasteful and disrespectful behaviour toward environment and fellow life forms. There is hope yet that we may make a clean breast of these disgraceful habits and move toward better things. Much of human beauty is, unfortunately, only skin deep.